Open Source Network Virtualization

We recently made a decision to move our public chat channels away from freenode IRC, over to Slack. You can immediately sign up for our public Slack team at https://slack.midonet.org. Midokura started out using IRC long ago, and moved to more modern chat based systems awhile ago and never looked back. Slack has been our tool of choice to communicate internally for many reason. It has many more features, and is generally easier to use than IRC for non-techie people.

We originally went with IRC for the open MidoNet community because it was the typical tool used to communicate for open source projects. Unfortunately, many of the tools which open source projects use are becoming antiquated, and in need of something better. We’ve seen tons of open source projects moving their code repositories over to Github for modern tools and communication, but chat has remained stagnant. We think that it’s time for a change.

We recently saw some other communities moving over to Slack, and decided to make the jump ourselves. We’ve used an open source project called SlackIn to create the automated signup page found at https://slack.midonet.org. Huge props to rauchg for creating this great project which enables open source communities to take advantage of all that Slack has to offer.